13 Oct The War Starters

They say the victors write history, but that’s just the outcome of one possible timeline. Sometimes in war, as in peace, some things are better remembered, lest history repeat itself.  Then again, in the far reaches of believability, some things are better left forgotten – or unspoken of.

Part 1: The Land Monitors

From the somewhat inevitable Confederate secession in 1861, the internal American conflict for destiny and freedom had continued – along with its emotional divisions and confused loyalties within families and localities.  Then somehow things changed along the way of war, technological revelations bringing with it inexplicable carnage into the hands of men from unknown influences. As of 1867, almost four million American soldiers and civilians, not to mention foreign mercenaries, had been killed in what had become known as the Civil War, or The War Between The States, or the War of Northern Aggression, depending on whose side you listened to. Either way, tens of thousands of young bodies on both sides were still being continually thrown away into the unpredictably gruesome and body-maiming maw of the new style of combat known as trench warfare. Defeat or victory was still contested between the asymmetrically resourceful defenses of the agrarian South versus the North’s huge industrial might, strangling coastal blockades and seemingly endless manpower.

Where once a certain defeat may have been propagated by the Federalists upon the Secessionists in early 1865 (perhaps in another timeline), a deadly equalization courtesy of the Industrial Revolution had come to pass over America during the past several years, thanks to the effectiveness of a new generation of unimaginable steam weapons. However, the origins of their designs were unknown, even as they were rapidly and mysteriously deployed to the willing parties.

The struggling Confederate States of America (CSA), had regained new-found strength with these provisions from the self-interests of Great Britain. The new allies offered battle first with its innovative inventions and struck relentlessly, with crawling, ironclad beasts appearing from clandestine Anglo-Confederate factories and rails in the Appalachian Mountains into the Union-occupied valleys, hills and rail junctions, allowing a relatively few men to surround an entire battalion at a time. Counter-blockades from British ironclads and prototype submarines lurking in CSA ports crushed Union wooden warships like kindling.

These sudden, shocking blows slowly sealed anti-war sentiments in the Union and the 1864 reelection ruination for Abraham Lincoln, who was eventually killed by Northern anti-war extremists in 1865. His successor, former Army of the Potomac General George McClellen, blindly fought on to defeat a resurgent South while in the Midwest – the Union’s backyard no less, radical anti-war peace Democrats known as Copperheads burned entire towns, liberated war prisons and sucked the life out of the USA’s offensive into the Deep South. They forcefully demanded an end to the bloodbath and formal recognition of the CSA, but any such reconciliatory termination of the war fell on the deaf ears of the disgraced egomaniac McClellan.

Indeed, the field of battle had been leveled for the CSA by the mighty industry of Great Britain starting back in 1864, as it openly committed to back and provide this new arsenal to a collapsing Confederacy after both a strange and great blight and drought obliterated its own colonies’ cotton crops in India and Egypt. Soon enough, the Empire was admonishing its nobles to arrive hat in hand, along with wary envoys from France, to its new CSA ally for exclusive rights to and protection of the South’s coveted crop. With this development, the ugly issue of resolving slavery would have to remain for another day, with several million subjugated peoples’ fates still hanging in the balance.

Of course, though, it wasn’t long before the Union had countered with its own similar steam-powered weapon variations and promptly proceeded to lay waste to a CSA uprising in Nashville, pounded positions in the mountainous but vital CSA salt mine country of western Virginia and easily destroyed swaths of their essential crops in the Shenandoah Valley with devices shooting long-range projectiles of poisonous Greek fire. The North liked to return favors on a grander scale whenever possible.

Each side desperately grasped for any method to provide them with the upper hand and a final blow. The new armaments for both parties had killing ability that was truly unprecedented and terrifying. First usually came the low drone of slowly floating, propellor-driven steam airships dropping bombs imbibed with razor-sharp grapeshot shrapnel, noxious poisonous gas or exploding human cultures of cholera and malaria on forts or critical civilian targets such as urban train stations.

Then, if the opposing community or army position did not yield but was deemed safe to advance into, there was the massive killing ratio of hand-held Gatling gun rifles and revolving steam cannons as well that relegated muzzle-loaders and even Spencer repeating rifles to worthless metal. (And oh yes, thanks to Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite, the South now needed fewer of its limited manpower to execute raids of terrorism from garrisons in the hills of Kentucky to downtown ironworks and munitions factories in Pittsburgh.)

Finally, to clear any formal resistance, there were the three classes of virtually impenetrable behemoths with two track drives known as ‘land monitors’. They were all based on metal platforms somewhat resembling ‘monitor’ ironclad riverboats, some with steam-actuated cannons and Gatlin guns; some as giant troop and cargo carriers, or some with the feared catapults carried on flatbeds – as though a deadly relic from the Middle Ages – used for sieges. Such a deployment occurred at Louisville, where surprised and surrounded Union citizens there died in the wake of deprivation of food and supplies, as well as the hellish bombardment from exploding grapeshot canisters, and even more sinister projectiles such as diseased enemy corpses being hurled over any fortifications or trenches, hopefully hitting a well or other drinking source.

While the land monitors, with their two locomotive-sized engines in the rear, one to power and steer each track, required constant refueling from wood-conveying steam wagons, they slowly but surely crushed anything or anyone in their paths as they ravaged both the cities and the countryside, and after a while were even transported by dauntingly armored locomotives to subdue any vanguard of each other’s enemy in the burnt-out crop fields and bombarded wastelands of the distant fronts.

Meanwhile, driven by the modern grue of unforgiving, ruthless mechanization, the horror of the surgeon’s bone saw worked day and night on both sides, with lines of wounded, resistant souls providing endless piles of shattered, amputated human limbs which became stacked like decaying firewood outside of screamed-filled, bloody field hospitals.

On one hand, what was left of the undermanned South’s fragmented territory dealt with slow starvation, desertion and increasing slave uprisings. A collective last stand for the CSA’s government and way of life was being prepared in its de facto far-west capital of Houston, Texas by the charismatic new Confederate President, Major General John Hunt Morgan, who was appointed after Jefferson Davis had been captured during the evacuation of Richmond. Outside of the CSA’s stalwart holdout areas of secessionist support in Louisiana, Arkansas and western Missouri, and now some sympathetic parts of northern Mexico, its crumbling strongholds in the Eastern Theater were now on their own, perhaps being only propped up by British steam armor and ironclad blockade runners to outlast the human meat-grinder attrition strategy of Union General Ulysses S. Grant.

On the other hand, the war had become a national quagmire of conscription riots and Southern insurgencies for the Republic, with McClellan’s ongoing political promises and talk of total victory set amidst endless waves of casualties returned to grieving families, as if bloated bodies displayed on some macabre conveyor belt.

The tired forces of Robert E. Lee and Grant were starting to talk publicly of striking a truce to this grinding stalemate. If Lee’s and Joe Johnston’s ragtag armies were able to keep on the move or hole up in their last Appalachian stronghold centered at Asheville, North Carolina with its own cache of steam weapons, this cat-and-mouse game could continue for another twenty years, and with it the now-evident disintegrating military conduct of the war.

Operating from a bunker below the White House, US President McClellan slowly realized the quest for American reunification was over without a knockout blow to the South, but now found his own side also simply fighting to elude an escalation with Brittania’s fist. Since there was presently no clear path to victory in sight for the Union or the Confederacy and its entangled British benefactors, now Prussia, Russia, Spain and even the Austro-Hungarian Empire were all hedging bets and whispering in their royal halls on whose side to take in the American debacle and how to profit from it if the conflict widened.

A worldwide conflict loomed, which was just what the far-away War Starters had been planning for centuries. Even now, while men of this period brazenly destroyed each other to unite or divide their land, the War Starters patiently waited in the shadows, all too glad to share their technology to all comers and ensure a slow but sure annihilation of the Earth’s people by their own hands.

Part 2: The Bushwhacker and the Jayhawker

Tuesday, June 18^th, 1867

After all, the North had started it! Y’all don’t understand, this is our land!

Confederate Army Captain and company commander Eli Slade cursed the sticky underbrush as he snuck through the sweltering and hilly forest at the western fringes of the Ozarks, but not as much as he cursed himself for getting separated from his own men on an increasingly foggy night march last Friday, somewhere between Joplin and Carthage.  He had exercised poor judgment to be sure, choosing to ride in the supply wagon, then jumping off in the dark to inspect what he thought was the straggling rear guard.

Slade’s soldiers were partisan members of the 1st Company, Ozark Volunteer Regiment (OVR), men from the Missouri 4^th Brigade and who had elected to stay behind and fight in the virtually lawless no-man’s land of the Trans-Mississippi Theater. It was bad enough that entire companies of Slade’s regiment had already been cut off and fragmented weeks ago from what was left of Sterling Price’s army, which was once again repelled from overtaking and burning the strategic Union ironclad shipyards and rails at Saint Louis, perhaps foretelling the last stand of the beleaguered South to reclaim any access to the Mississippi River and somehow reconnect to and reinforce its faltering Eastern Theater armies. It seemed that wherever they were positioned, the South never had enough men.

The captain was a lanky but tough middle-aged man originally from back East, with high Appalachian cheeks, a dour long face and long hair, beard and mustache. Slade wore sweaty civilian mountaineer clothes, as did most of the threadbare OVR, sometimes proving difficult to decipher friend from foe in the distance without the usual butternut or grey distinctions of the South’s armies. His diminished and separated group of fifty so-called ‘border ruffians’ had not the firepower to engage a full Union battalion, but since no one seemed to know their whereabouts, they aimlessly patrolled and raided the sparsely-populated Ozark regions of the southwestern Missouri and northwestern Arkansas with Secessionist impunity.

Rustled up some fresh hay for the horses and got some nice hams for the boys last week, courtesy of that Unionist farmer with his comely wife we held at gunpoint, heh, heh. Now, I’ll tell ya, that pork we butchered and smoked right there behind their own barn before we burned it down, that there was some meat – and I mean meat!

They also decimated all the family’s growing crops and had shot any other livestock they couldn’t use on their mission, a self-imposed upcoming march to overtake the Union refuge at Fort Smith, Arkansas, leaving behind little food for any Northern pursuers. The farmer’s youngest daughter bawled as the snarling family dogs and her pet goat were also executed by the OVR for good measure. Still, Slade and his lieutenants were Southern gentlemen whenever possible, and they enforced that she and her older sisters be exempt from any predictable ill treatment from the young and lonely enlisted men.

Then later that night, as fog closed in on their position, even as the captain had impatiently searched for the delinquent rear guard, the nearby supply wagon suddenly exploded in flames and an unforeseen firefight erupted. In the quick skirmish, a small, well-hidden Union force had waylaid them in the dark, firing blindly but long enough to scatter Slade’s men, many of whom were left behind on the ground screaming, some missing body parts from a fearsome and well-aimed steam cannon. The Southerners who had kept their small fireboxes hot enough and water tanks filled soon returned rounds with the hiss of their unwieldly but lethal steam-powered Gatling revolving rifles, cutting through the unseen Union line with Minie balls as if they were butter.

The Yankees hunkered down and returned the favor, with a man in their rear loading a huge shotgun whose projectile was the new weapon called dynamite, lobbing several sticks with subsequent explosions into the CSA’s vicinity with deadly effect. Another union man shouted something explicit and hurled a canister that exploded by the burning CSA supply wagon with poisonous greenish-grey toxic fumes, a chemical weapon dissipating as the Confederates began to choke and run away from it simply to breathe. A more disciplined Southern sharpshooter with a now old-fashioned Tredegar rifle wasted no time to home in on the Union shotgun man as he attempted to launch another round in the mini-mortar’s giant breach, his match to light the fuse giving him away. The Secessionist’s bullet hit him through the smoky dark square in the chest, and as he collapsed the dynamite detonated in the barrel, leaving a gaping, burning hole in the ground where the man’s body had been.

This proved to be enough retaliation for the decimated Union raiders, and they promptly fled, abandoning their steam cannon, shouting obscenities and blending back into the dark woods, hoping to fall back to their original position somewhere unnoticeable within the secesh-controlled territory.

For several sweaty hours, Slade had to lay quietly on the moist soil and groundcover, fazed but amazingly uninjured, not certain when to raise his head. However, despite this consternation, he found that no one from his company had returned for him or the CSA injured. Nor did they come the next day, even as he still waited anxiously in hiding, hearing no more cries from the abandoned wounded, not even a moan echoing among the insects. The hilly, fragrant deciduous forest would soon smell chokingly ripe with the decay of decomposing human and horse flesh. As he cautiously got up and stumbled around the battle scene, Slade had decided it best for his chances of survival as the apparently only non-injured soldier there was to loot the dead’s water, ammunition, food and coal pellets for an intact steam-gun he found, then skedaddle while the opportunity was there and try to find reinforcements amid this insane hide-and-seek game.

No one left but me.

Now, days later and lost alone in the humid mid-summer woods with its pounding insect noises on the western edge of the Ozarks, he thought emptily about the helpless countrymen he had to leave behind with no medical supplies, consigning them to a slow, diseased death or a sudden stab from a damnyankee’s bayonet, either way destined as corpses with skin as white as an antebellum mansion’s bedsheet. So much for circling back and taking Fort Smith, he sulked as he rationed another drink from his dirty canteen and checked his insulated haversack for some remaining food. He could only hope there were some uninjured men who made it out and somehow regrouped to overrun the Union garrison at Fort Smith, or maybe reinforce Springfield, the de facto CSA headquarters of Missouri. That new-fangled gas assault was a bad surprise, but still, this was my company and they deserted at a critical moment on my watch, he thought. Whether we win or not, I’ll bide my time and make certain someone will hang for that.

Truthfully, most of the Missouri 4th were now Confederate soldiers in name only; their real jurisdiction, as with many who fought in the remote and overlooked Trans-Mississippi theater of the war, had degenerated into a campaign of vigilantism. Bushwhackers, they were called by the Northern scum. Slade conceded the label willingly, as he at some point besides being in the regular CSA army had fought under the most notorious of the marauding Bushwhacker raiders who terrorized Missouri and Kansas: Bloody Bill Anderson, William Quantrill and his underlings Frank and Jesse James, to name a few.

While he had not condoned atrocities against civilians in Bleeding Kansas and the new Union state of Nebraska, his group had alternately witnessed the smoldering aftermath of a pro-South Missouri church burned to the ground on a Sunday morning, its congregants probably singing hymns until they realized they had been locked inside by Jayhawkers to burn alive or be tortured and shot if they made it out.

This mindlessness kept his resolve to maintain these far western reaches for the Confederacy at all costs. For hardened partisans like Slade, the war was not anymore about secession, slavery or states’ rights; it was about killing and retaliating against the barbarian Union partisans known as Jayhawkers, the arch-enemies of the Bushwhackers. To both parties, their regional cutthroat conflict had long ago become lawless and unaccountable, a groin-kicking war within a war – and they both liked it that way.

Now, next to the machine-driven battles out east, the almost serene solitude of fighting in the Missouri backwoods almost made sense by contrast, Slade thought. For those who fought in this forgotten outback, crude and unchecked guerrilla warfare methods were still preferred, and its combatants and their tactics hailed only to the ‘black flag’, the symbol of no surrender, the real modus operandi between the ‘Whackers’ and ‘Hawkers’.

As the captain now trudged along the edge of the ominous-looking woods which abutted a large expanse of rolling prairie to the west as far as the eye could see, he reckoned from his bearings that he was way beyond the Arkansas border, probably near the frontier reservation town of Miami well into Indian Territory. He wondered if he did make it to that town at all, would they be friend or foe? While Slade felt confident that he had enough hardtack and dried meat provisions, water and extra rounds of firepower to last for some time, he grimly hoped that his men would find him before the Jayhawkers or some hostile Indians did.

Presently, he relieved himself against a large tree and wiped his hands on the dusty ground; no officers’ privy or washbasin out here. He then thought he heard something, or someone, move in the nearby locality of the thick underbrush. Slade crouched and didn’t have to remind himself that while the rest of the war’s advanced atrocities may not matter out here, he still did.

* * * * * *

Wednesday, June 19^th, 1867

After all, the South had started it! You don’t understand, this is our land!

Union Sergeant Jerome Hawkins fumed, as he had also been unfortunately separated from his own twenty-some enlisted men during the area’s recent fog and summer storms, his troops needlessly being spread out too far to picket the perimeter of their camp properly. Their Jayhawker forces, Union extremists from a former Kansas Home Guard militia detachment based up in Silver Maple Creek, were out patrolling on their own with a hunch to get the Bushwhacker devils from the OMV before they could double back to attack the Sunflower State from the south. Yes, it would be just like Quantrill to send a band of his savages to distract the Unionist troops, then ride in to burn an entire innocent town to the ground, with no men, women or children being spared from killing, rape or scalping if it pleased their purposes.

He had no idea his militia was so close to the enemy when they had randomly attacked some drawling voices in the forest the previous weekend. When the evil Rebs returned fire, many of his own men had also sadly scattered into the woods like little children, firing in retreat instead of mustering a line that could have crushed the Secessionists. Moreover, the Southerners had those new and accurate British-made rifles and steam-powered Gatling guns, always kept hot and at the ready, called ‘machine guns’, one of which had killed several of his best men, including his friend and right-hand man, Corporal James Penninger. Some sort of Union victory in this disputed green hellhole was essential for morale, and now here he was not even able to find his own unit. Damn.

A stout, balding, no-nonsense twenty-something with then-trendy handlebar sideburns, Sergeant Hawkins had lived in Topeka, Kansas as a reserve before Confederates had raided it last year. He subsequently enlisted in the most belligerent elements of the state Home Guard militia, under the harsh tutelage and indoctrination of the late James Henry Lane, a former Indiana school teacher and U. S. congressman turned Jayhawker and a master butcher of Southern sympathizers in the far west.

Now, Hawkins found himself simply stuck alone in these confounded woods, trying to get back to his own troops.  He chewed on his next-to-last plug of tobacco as his worn-out boots crunched some dried underbrush along the western edge of the forest, where a vibrantly green tree canopy and undergrowth gave way to the west into a rolling and colorful tallgrass prairie dotted with a few hardy burr oaks, a mild breeze rustling to make them sing. He wished not to engage the xenophobic reservation Indians along the way to a Union safe house somewhere in this no-man’s land.

No one left but me.

He suddenly heard a syncopated walking sound in the woods, crunching the forest bottom leaf litter but not like that of an animal, and he readied his muddied Springfield rifle, a standard Union-issue repeater that was already loaded with his few shots left. As he breathed slowly in the pungent air of the humid woods and its constant noises of birds and insects, the enlisted man’s stomach growled loudly, giving away the fact that he hadn’t eaten much in the past two days.

Focus…

The straggly man approached him out of the thick shaded growth, armed himself with a smoldering, revolving Gatling rifle and its long hanging ammunition belt – a Southerner!

Part 3: The Pit of Reconciliation

“Drop it and you might live, ‘Whacker!” Hawkins suddenly yelled from behind a large, thick-trunked ash tree, raising his own trusty Springfield.

The greasy man, caught off guard, quickly responded by leaning behind an equally large red maple, raising and aiming his steaming rifle and commanded, “You drop it, damnyankee!  This is my forest!”

“Yeah, yours and whose army?”  Hawkins laughed at the old cliché, within a hundred yards from his foe, “This is my forest, Reb. We both know the CSA is on the verge of collapse; give up now!”

“You wish! They’s talking a truce between Washington and us even as we speak.  Heard the British’ll probably take y’all back over before it’s done. Don’t matter no how. My men will be here to rendezvous with me shortly – maybe the whole damn regiment – and then they’ll scalp you just like Bloody Bill would!”

“Typical Bushwhacker – uncivilized! Oh no sir, my men will be here first…and scalpin’ won’t be good enough for the likes of you. Try gettin’ dragged all the way back on a dirt road to Kansas to stand trial for sedition…if you survive it. Shame you didn’t skedaddle while you had the chance. But then again, maybe I ain’t gonna shoot a man in the back, not even a ‘Whacker. Then I’d be as nasty as you all!”

Both men talked fiercely about what would happen to each other next, with expectant chest-puffing and bluffing about the proximity of their non-existent men, while both realizing the other’s lack of sufficient ammunition, food and water. A good shot from Hawkin’s Springfield would take this Secesh trash out, but if the Reb volleyed first with that steaming large-bore Gatling gun that could spray rounds everywhere…Of course, the firebox heat needed to supply the Gatling would get to any man in this weather soon enough to make a mistake in his position, so Hawkins could wait, he hoped. They both breathed heavily and tensely waited a spell for each other to answer in the light rustling late afternoon breeze of the towering, serene woods, its dappled light making its way through the ancient trees to the damp forest floor. A somewhat lost and large corn snake slithered unnoticed between their positions quickly and slid into the underbrush, not wishing to engage the warm beings’ fray.

Slade, also ground down by hunger and lack of his own reinforcements’ arrival, started thinking and, conceding a novel thought, “Yeah?  Well, I reckon could pick you off easy enough  from here, but maybe I ain’t gonna. If it’s just you and me, we could shoot each other any time we wanted to, right? Well then, how ’bout a wager? A fair fight? That’d be new for your kind, wouldn’t it? Ha! Just you ‘n me, no guns or knives, just mano a mano out there in the open, about a few hundred feet away outa these woods and down there on that open bluff over that fen? You man enough to do it, boy?”

“Yeah, ah-right, now that’d be a pleasure.” Hawkins conceded eagerly, peeling off his own greasy coat, laying down his arms and backpack in some semblance of trust, and rolling up his sleeves in the hot sun that pummeled them both when he exited the shaded woodline. He strutted into the open ridgeline overlooking a nearby soggy prairie field and gestured for the rebel ‘Whacker to start something.

Slade simultaneously dropped his weapons and provisions as well and advanced with a determined grimace and deep breaths. His own worn boots were chaffing him something fierce, but he’d manage to put one into the younger damnyankee’s rear end before it was over.

“King’s rules on boxing, right?” Slade joked.

“Good one! Hell no, ain’t no rules out here, Reb. We’ve all been out pitchin’ the black flag against each other long enough to know that. Ain’t no Limey steamers comin’ to save your sorry hillbilly ass now like they keep doing, neither. Anything goes, you know at least that. By the way, whose Secesh backside do I have the honor of kicking today?”

“Captain Eli Slade, 1^st Company, Ozark Volunteer Reigment, sir. Don’t worry, they’ll be coming outta nowhere soon enough and put one on you, man!”

“Well Captain, I’m Sergeant Jerome Hawkins, officially Kansas Home Guard. Let’s see if you can put one on me!”

Slade nodded in anticipatory agreement and let out the eerie Rebel Yell as he ran forward and thrust himself at the younger, barrel-chested Union man.

The brutal hand-to-hand fighting went on unrelentingly for several minutes, with Slade and Hawkins both offering blood-letting strategic punches, wild roundhouses to each other faces and pretty soon with predictable attempted kicks to the nether regions.  Before long both were bloodied and exhausted and neither could stand well. Still, they managed to stagger up and went at it again, and as both grappled they suddenly tumbled down a dirty, bruising embankment and fell over a ten-foot tall washed-out cliff into some muck. It was then that they both realized in their brawl among the quiet fen of rustling grasses and croaking bullfrogs they had neglected a simple truth of nature in these soggy lower pockets of the forest – quicksand!

Both men struggled to right themselves and breathe once they realized their predicament, the firm soil nearby on the bank now out of reach. On the far side from which they had fallen, the eroded clay and silt of the embankment offered nothing but a tall, slippery, muddy wall back up onto high ground. They could either try the impossible vertical slope up to freedom or tread through this viscous muck to the other, flatter side of the pond. Attempting either option appeared to ensure exhaustion and death.

Slade punched Hawkins in the head while they both bobbled in the thick soup of the quicksand, but the attempt also just drove him incrementally deeper into the deadly sediment. Hawkins came up with a black eye, nonetheless.

“Where’s your Jayhawkers now, boy? We’ll both die here, so I’ll tell ya, my men will hit Saint Louis and burn it!  I wish Lincoln was still alive to see it!”

“I aughta just drown you here and now, no one would care, slave-monger! My men will be here first and rescue me – I’ll see all of you Bushwhackers hang for your deeds before I die!”

Slade spat blood into the muck from a blow delivered well but barely within reach by Hawkins and breathed heavily, “Don’t look to me like anyone’s gonna be left to hang, ha! We can’t even move in this mire. By the way, I wasn’t outa ammo.”

“Neither was I, ‘Whacker.  And I’m a better shot!”

“Sorry, I’d like to see that. By the way, hope you’re a better swimmer, ’cause you’re drowning.”

“You are too, Reb, I noticed…”

As both men breathed heavily and bickered about the atrocities committed by each other’s sides and subsequently laid claim with conviction to this inhospitable part of the Ozarks for their own parties (and all of Kansas and Missouri and the rest of America, for that matter), they came to realize that despite their flailing, they had both slowly gone from knee-deep to waist-deep in the putrid muck. Time for partisan posturing and arguing was running out, which began to produce a sudden change of heart for both men, as sometimes mortally grave situations have the capacity to do so.

Soon, a carrion bird started to screech and circle in the distance as the mosquitoes hovered in some swamp trees and let on the helpless men. Luckily, the bordering edge of trees kept the sun from cooking the isolated quicksand pit. As Slade and Hawkins both started to breathe with difficulty, they contemplated their unfortunate long-term prospects with a new common, if fatalistic, ground. Did any of this war matter to the two solitary soldiers here now, being slowly killed in this quiet and unknown deathtrap? Would anyone back home miss them?

Slade went first, slurring his words from a hit on the face from Hawkins and breathing heavily, “Hey, damnyankee…Suppose, just suppose, we worked together to git outa this mess. You don’t have to tell your people about it; neither do I. Ya know, I knew this preacher, Wagner, had his church locked up and burned down on a Sunday morning service in your Osceola raid. His own wife and little children were killed by your people! Still, he only talked about forgiveness and grace before he left town. Our troops came to see the carnage, but he was long gone, my brother heard he was involved with that crazy Copperhead prison breakout at Camp Douglas in Chicago in ’64; ain’t nobody heard what happened to him or any of the men since. Anyway, maybe he had a point, Hawkins. Mercy and grace.”

“That’s good talk for preachers – but how ’bout fessing up on the Lawrence Massacre? You Bushwhackers didn’t need to line up and kill damn near two-hundred men and boys outa the blue! Yeah, it’d be nice if this sh*t all stopped, but how? We’re sworn enemies. And even if we ain’t, our own men surely are. But ya know…maybe it don’t have to be like that no more. The War in the East looks like a stalemate at best. Damn new land monitors blowin’ up everything between Richmond and Philadelphia an’ down to Atlanta. Never seen one, but I heard they’ll break right through a building wall and blow you clean away into little pieces! Even if the Brits break our blockade in Charleston and Norfolk, it don’t sound like there’ll be much of a South left for white or black even if you do win.”

The captain reflected upon this situation as he tried to stay afloat in the slime, “Yeah, maybe so, but this ain’t the time to contemplate states rights and slaves and such right now, seein’ that we’re drowning and ain’t to shore yet. So…maybe then our own feudin’ is startin’ to look downright stupid anymore. Well, neither of us is gonna win nothin’ anyway, from the way it looks of things. Damn war’s gonna go on and on ’til nothin’ and nobody’s left, ‘cluding us!”

Hawkins tried to absorb this grim fact before he cautiously spoke, “Yeah, now you’re talking truth, Slade. So, you gonna help me out of this muck before we both drown?”

“Reckon that would be a good start. Ah-right, I give you my word as a gentleman and a Southerner, we work together. My Daddy said a man ain’t worth nothing without his word, probably yours said the same. Whoever’s men find us first, well, we could have a truce of our own, or at least be treated right as a prisoner, anyway. Maybe even have a drink together before the higher-ups tell us to go back at it with each other. Ain’t like they’re on the front line, right?” Hawkins had to laugh a little at that.

“Hmm, now that sounds good, Reb. Yeah, I’m in. Okay, whoever’s troops show up first acts like real Americans and lets the other party go. Be a good example, maybe at least to start a real peace,” Hawkins spewed enthusiastically as he started to cough up a bit of sand and tried to lift his one free arm and wipe away the blood that covered one eye.

Both men needed to create some good news soon, as they were breathing heavily, continuing to be slowly but inevitably absorbed into the unforgiving, inescapable sinkhole, getting almost chest-deep in it now. The inevitability of mortality and the consequences for the afterlife now seemed as reasonable to both men as going to a nearby pond at home with their small children to catch fish for dinner in a calm, basking evening sunlight.

Hawkins quickened the conversation, “Now, we’d best work together hurry-up time; if you can reach this crooked stick floatin’ here and hook it on that bent-over sapling over yonder by the bank; we could pull each other out with it. Remember, I’m trusting you too, Captain.”

Both exhausted men decided in their desperation to yell for help, their cries somewhat muffled by a rare summer breeze that rustled the nearby placid tallgrass prairie and oak openings. They continued to cry out as Slade made every effort to extend his weary arms through the cementish muck to grab the lone branch and hook it on the bowed sapling near the bottom of the concave cliff they had tumbled off…almost! Even in the sweltering summer heat, the clammy sand was colder than swimming in a mint julep. As their breathing both became more laborious, Slade wondered if Hawkins also had a family waiting back home for him as well.  He started to realize now that, perhaps more ominous than their own helpless demises, neither man’s kin may ever get a letter sent from their respective governments’ home to tell what had happened to them. Just a needless disappearance and death in a quicksand pool, no trace of their beings for posterity, no tombstone, ever.

As Slade and Hawkins worked together slowly toward an exit from the vacuumous quicksand, both heard the slowly increasing clatter and deep rumbles approaching near them. The low grinding sounds and rhythmic chugging got gradually louder and resonated throughout the area, even sending ripples into the turgid liquid of the sinkhole itself.

Slade looked at Hawkins and said with some fright as he frantically tried to hook the sapling to safety, “Land Monitor!”

The slow-moving and looming iron machine was still a bit far off but were closing in on the fen with purpose.           Averaging about twenty feet tall, fifty feet long and twenty feet wide, its ominous presence gave no flag or other identity as to which country they represented. The finish on the giant machine was a weird matte pale red, not signifying allegiance to North or South. Foreign, unintelligible shouts resonated within the hot cabins of the iron overlord as steam and whirring weaponry could easily ready volleys of potential death to an entire company of men.

Gears meshed loudly as the metal mammoth struggled to transcend the grade of the valley adjacent to the upland forest.  The exhaust from the giant rear dual steam engines provided enormous clouds from their wood fireboxes and superheaters, temporarily blocking out part of the scorching midday sun.

The monitor made a slow, grinding, whirring sound as it halted near the top of the sunken sandpit and dedicated the front two of its four steam gear-driven Gatling guns to home in on the two men.

Slade and Hawkins both protested desperately, now almost neck-deep in the pungent slime as they tried to pull to the tree branch and safety, “Help us! We’re both Americans here! Americans!”

Part 4: The War Starters

The huge iron contraption had a hatch at the top, and it opened to reveal a tall, burly and smooth-skinned Indian and then a second climbing out, carefully using the ladder on the monitor to avoid being burned on the hot metal tubing that conveyed the steam to the various guns. Strangely, the men seemed to tolerate or even prefer the heart from within the forward slits and iron control booth casings of the monitor. The natives were youngish and stood straight, but neither wielded traditional bows and arrows or even a rifle. Instead, one brandished a weird-looking yellow handgun with a long needle-ish end on it. The taller man held a small black box in his hand.  He activated a button on it and pointed it at the two ensnared soldiers, and incredibly they suddenly rose out of the quicksand by some invisible force and landed soundly on the far ground in front of the two braves. The man clicked the box again, terminating the levitation beam.

The tall one, adorned with strange war paint, spoke, in English no less, “We have been tracking your struggle and need to know why two men from the different sides now work together to keep each other alive.  Were you all not provided with enough equipment to destroy each other? Answer!”

Slade went first, “We was just trying to keep our skins, the sergeant and I reckoned we didn’t need to kill each other now. This war means we could kill each other anytime, but you only get out of death’s way maybe once, I reckon. That means something to us in the North and South, but maybe not to you people.”

“This cannot happen! We introduced these weapons of steam for your governments who willingly accepted them. Stupid Earthers, it is for your annihilation, not for your advancement. I regret that we have little choice but to exterminate you ourselves. But we shall show you our intentions first. Why not?”

“But…you’re prairie savages, how could you people know anything about steam power – or wheels for that matter?!”

Both natives laughed at that, “We would have preferred to wait and introduce more advanced weapons of self-destruction to you and your frigid planet for another hundred years or so – by then your Earth would be overrun with drought, food shortages, pestilence and climate change from your foolish squandering of resources – resources perfect and sustainable for a more deserving race such as ours!  Your carbon emissions here are the richest in the quadrant, exactly what we need – and will take! However, we collectively thought this juncture in your development would be riper to accelerate your premise of nation-state identity to let you wipe each other out with this ever-increasing primitive ‘civil war’. Ha! Even now, others of your planet’s empires are plotting to willingly join the carnage, and then we simply wait until it is time after your race is sufficiently weakened to come in and – how would you say in the future? – mop up.”

As the shorter Indian slowly raised his foreign handgun at the soldiers, a smaller, sweaty third man emerged from the hot confines of the monitor’s control booth, blurting out a request for the monitor’s next directions and indicating an urgent incoming message from the homeworld.

As the apparent leader of the group turned to rebuke him for insolently interrupting the interrogation of the filthy Earthers and to check and restock the wood fuel levels of their primitive monitor, that was all the time it took for Slade and Hawkins to look at each other, nod and rush the tall man first.  They lunged and fought for control of his black box; it had some great meaning to these Indians. Finally, as he was subdued with many blows, the other Indian was able to unholster his yellow weapon and fire blindly. Hawkins grabbed his arm and the bright beam of light the thing produced swung wildly, cutting treetops and the iron monitor’s rear gun tower as if it was fresh butter. In the melee, Slade helped Hawkins twist the Indian’s arm into a painful grip; the handgun discharged a ray upward that promptly cut off a large wire on the machine. The severed shiny protuberance looked somewhat like an insect’s antennae. What happened next was beyond explanation to the two nineteenth century men as they stepped back in amazement.

With the antennae-thing destroyed, the form of the large Indians suddenly changed, as if their form vaporized, leaving three diminutive and helpless-looking four-foot-tall green beings, with humanesque faces but three scaly arms, two legs and seven digits on each elongated hand. A conical or pyramidal shaped skull with varying sizes and placement of three eyes each defined them, perhaps as different breeds of this strange race. With their cloaking device smashed, their human facade was now finished.

“You fools!” the larger one shrilled, still in English, “You destroyed the quantum emulator! Now all we have left is our communicators!  Ha! But then again, what is it to you? So now you two see our intentions – we mask ourselves as your allies, then destroy your race and take your carbon for ourselves and power our great space cities! It is our destiny, so why not share our intentions of the inevitable?!”

“Yes, I am not, how you say, “Indian’, but is makes for a fitting disguise to recruit your resentful primitive native tribes and gather against the ‘Americans’ with even more advanced steam weapons we intend to introduce. A ‘third front’ will only escalate the war and hate.”

“I am Group Leader C426, overseer of subjugating the human race by fomenting your endless wars. Your feeble, arrogant leaders actually thank our people for these weapons while they send the young and the poor to die in their places and do their bidding, ha ha!”, he laughed in a strange timbre of a voice.

As the green men were boasting of their eminent conquest and deciding the fates of the meddlesome Americans, just then, in the far distance a small but blinding explosion occurred. It was miles northeast of their position, but Slade and Hawkins stood in awe as some sort of heat and sound shock wave temporarily pounded them.

The second alien, TU667, sighed and looked at the humans as the unbearable light flash and hot shock wave passed and spoke in a broken accent, “That was your Kansas City, now gone. Be warned, you may die also from invisible sickness if you steal land monitor and proceed there.”

This day keeps getting better, Slade thought in dismal amazement. He somehow knew the green-skin was telling the truth.

C426 fumed into what energy remained of his in-body communication device, “Idiots! You sent the fission devices far ahead of its appointed time and one has just been intercepted, interpreted, and detonated!  The Earthers are not supposed to receive that level of technology for another thirty years! We still must share interim weapon systems to seduce them to that level of self-destruction. You know the Plan of Patience agreed to from centuries past – what were you thinking, DT495?! The Supreme Leaders will have us all put in the Cone of Pain for a sun-cycle if they find out and the Earthers don’t amplify their war efforts over this!”

“Group Leader sir,” the alien dejectedly answered over the scratchy, weakened signal, “we had interference from this planet’s sun’s magnetic fields; it distorted the mass-time transfer particle beams. From our readings at the launch base – that you prescribed, actually – we thought it was already another thirty Earth years in the future there to receive fission bombs – 1897, the next appointed time of technology time acceleration. Our operatives therefore thought this delivery to be an effective demonstration in their nether outposts would simply stimulate a retributive demand for more of our weapons. Unfortunately, our time agents have already acknowledged receiving similar bombs materializing in their “North” city of Washington and “South” city of Houston for the same purpose. Without your explicit signal stopping, the countdown software will be automatically engaged on arrival and produce critical mass at the next lunar rotation. Then there will be nothing we, or the Earthers of this day, can do to stop those explosions from occurring now unless your detonator signal is reversed or broken. A hundred-thousand humans at least will die, as may our operatives.”

“495, listen. Our body cloaking are destroyed and communication devices will be out of power shortly, thanks to these meddling pink-skinned soldiers we ran into. Tell Grand Leader H4956 to teleport another landing party immediately with sufficient political explanation to the gullible, polluting American human leaders. Of course the fallout from the fission weapon will kill thousands more of them with having no knowledge of radiation poisoning, but as with our other conquered worlds, we cannot harvest the carbon emissions on the scale we need without some native civilization remaining. We will still require slaves left for at least another two decrons, you know.”

“Look”, Captain Slade interjected, “y’all got two choices, either leave now and call off yer space people to leave us be, or you three go into that quicksand over yonder.  What’ll it be, sir?”

C426 slammed the comm button embedded within his chest, almost punching himself in the process. “Curse! You know our communications are failing…and without our emulator forcefields we are now no match for you physically. But ha! Know that more of us are on the way at the times of our choosing and we will seduce your infantile leaders; every planet’s inhabitants always yields to us for the façade of wealth and power. Yours will be no exception, and we will extract the carbon, gold or whatever else we want from you one way or the other. It comes down to this: either your planet is exploited, or ours dies, so either way we dare you to do what you wish to us, then.”

Despite his extensive intergalactic travels, C426, with his now-staticky language translator, did not realize bluffing did not always work on humans, but he would find out.  He thought sadly, maybe my last transmission should have been that they will become even more advanced soon enough by themselves if they don’t kill each other off first. Someday, they may come after us! We should have just stayed away from this miserable little solar system.

Hawkins had his eye on the flashing button of the leader’s belt – it may have been the detonator the green being was talking about. If this bomb was as bad as the green foreigner said, then blowing up Houston with one of those inhuman flashes of light would end the Southern rebellion, for sure, but then again having one blow up Washington or the secondary Union capital of Philadelphia would be victory for the Confederates.  An incomprehensible no win situation if they both went off.

Knowing what they both had to do, Hawkins scowled and wrapped his thick, muddy leather belt around his left fist, glancing at the Southerner; Slade nodded and followed suit by grabbing and wielding the large, muddy oak stick that had somehow survived the entire ordeal with Hawkins in the mire. They circled the three remaining aliens, the small, lithe greenish bodies of the invaders now visibly shaking and pulsating a strange pink color on their bodies. It took little time to pummel the leader, smashing his body and his flashing belt, then subduing the other puny aliens. The weary humans dragged and cast them over the cliff into the nearby quicksand. The vengeful invaders and their body technology – including the permanently clogged and disabled detonator for the already deployed fission bombs – slowly submerged.

The whereabouts of the super-bombs, delivered decades ahead of mankind’s otherwise natural discovery of atomic fission, now lie scattered somewhere in North America, hopefully lost in the annals of time and never igniting for their insidious use. The fate of the small men was not so lucky, as they made something like screaming noises as their bodies hit the viscous muck of the quicksand. Their flesh smoldered as Earth’s gravity and quiet but hostile wetlands – ironically full of carbon – slowly and painfully claimed their disintegrating bodies with its incompatible chemistry. Moreover, they had underestimated the human will to live and succeed, even in the contradictory behavior of battle, and now they would pay.

Slade looked at the disabled land monitor and thought how they may use the craft to get out of there, but decided it was best just to leave it for the reservation tribes such as the Osage, Choctaw or Cherokee to figure out and keep marching on foot – to somewhere. As he helped Hawkins onto his feet after the sergeant took a bit of a blow from one of the Indians/aliens, they trudged on back eastward, barely understanding what they saw or what it meant for the future of humanity. However, they both momentarily stared back at the helpless aliens moaning and dying in the inescapable acidic quicksand pit, realizing the incredible communications and power from their homeworld, wherever it was, were smashed. Their scheme to subdue Earth by technology time acceleration was now a failure, though only Slade and Hawkins alone knew there were others of those things still out there, doubtlessly watching and waiting to interact with and manipulate human war starters.

Whatever horrors during the remainder of this Civil War and its current steam advancements would unfold until its end, mankind itself had just dodged a hell of a bullet. Of course, no one in the 1860’s would believe their story, and they both knew it, so the strange conclusion to the interlopers’ tale went untold.

Amid the failed machinations of unknown distant foes, a warning echoed from the two exhausted but temporarily united soldiers through the forest to what was left of the melting aliens:

After all, YOU started it! You don’t understand, this is our land!